IWUPC prizes

Im writing in the forums to ask of anyone else who placed in the IWUPC contest has received their prizes yet?

My dive guide has already gotten his prize months ago, and I have been in contact with the organizers to arrange getting the prize but each time I email them they say they will look into it and I never hear back from them until weeks later after I send another email. Then the process repeats again.

Hi Bubbs,
I created a Facebook chat conversation between all of the winners and placeholders that I could find on Facebook back in February. Unfortunately I could not find everybody.
It seemed apparent at this time that the IWUPC organizers were not responding to any of our emails and it looked like none of us were going to get paid.

There are 17 of us in there, still quite a few unpaid and over 500 messages back and forth with alot of information to read if you want to know what has been going on.

Those of us who have been paid have been taxed very highly - up to 45%.

Send me a PM with your Facebook account details and I will add you to the conversation

Yes, this has gone on for way too long. It would seem that I need to open a new account for them to send my prize money, since they can't seem to get it to either of the US accounts that I have now. Add that to the fact that they don't answer emails for months at a time, and when they do it's from some anonymous gmail or hotmail account, so it all seems a bit shady. And they're hammering foreigners for 40-45% tax. I asked them to transfer my $12,000 prize to Simon's Indonesian bank and they refused. I'm assuming that they're refusing because they could only tax it 15%, as they did with Simon's prize. So it's now mid-April, and I've still not been paid.....

Wow... what a shame. I didn't know it was this bad. I talked to my guide and apparently he got taxed quite a bit as well. I'll visit the Facebook page and check it out. Is there anything that can be done?

So yes, it has been 7 months since the winners were announced and I have yet to be paid for 1st place in DSLR Macro ($12,000 USD.) They could not seem to figure out sending a wire transfer to any of the three banks that I use in the US. I provided the easy alternative to send the money to the resort owner's account, and provided a power of attorney that they requested, and still nothing. On top of that, my dive guide has not been paid either. Following every communication with them by email it would take 3-4 weeks to get a response, and now they just don't respond at all. And it's all being handled by random people with hotmail and gmail addresses, so there's no telling who you're actually speaking with.

In addition to that, all of the foreign winners were taxed at a rate of 43% of their total prize, so you know what's going on there.

If anyone involved with the competition has a way of contacting these people, it would be greatly appreciated. If they won't respond to me, maybe they will respond to someone else.

Evidently, after much Investigation since seeing one of the organisers at the diveshow in Germany, Paulus was paid back in August 2014 - So please disregard my posts after August 2014. I believe that means all guides are now paid. Hopefully the next iteration of this event will have a more fluid payment system.